Derrida's deferred meaning — signs gain significance through what they're not, through temporal and spatial deferral. In cinema: montage generates meaning by absence, not presence.
In editing, you notice it immediately: meaning arises not from what you see, but from what is not there. Derrida's Différance — this deliberately misspelled variant of "Différence" (the difference is only audible, not readable) — precisely describes the phenomenon we as editors exploit daily. Meaning is never present. It arises through delay, through the shift from one shot to the next, through what is missing.
Practically speaking: when you place two images side by side, something arises between them that neither contains on its own. A face — then an empty chair. The meaning (grief, absence, loss) is present neither in the face nor in the chair. It differs — it shifts, it is always already elsewhere. This is not meant metaphorically. This is the structure of montage. Every shot refers to every other shot that you do not show. Every cut position could have been different — and precisely this alternativism is the reason why your current choice signifies.
In the editing decision process, you work with Différance, whether you know the term or not. You omit images because their absence speaks more strongly than their presence. A wide shot of the street after a dialogue — instead of a close-up of the reaction. The missing reaction becomes the reaction. The empty space becomes the object. Dilations arise not from what lasts, but from what is suppressed. Sound and image work in Différance: the sound arrives before or after the image — the temporal displacement creates the dramatic meaning, not synchronicity.
Also perceptible in montage conventions: jump cuts function precisely because the missing element — continuous time — remains present as absence. The viewer fills the gap, not with logic, but with a kind of unconscious meaning-making. This is not ellipsis in the classical sense (simply omitting something) — this is a structural insight: no image closes itself. All images are references. Meaning is not on the film strip, meaning is in the gap.